New Custom Chip Design

[lwestatbus]

We visited my baby brother (53 years old) out in Newport Beach this summer and he drug out some miserable poker chips so I went ahead and made a new chip set for him. He lives on the Newport Beach Back Bay very near Balboa. I'd wanted to experiment with some of the newer 1.25 inch inset label chips and ordered them as well as 1.2 inch labels. I was actually pretty disappointed in the chips (see below) but they turned out ok (note lower case ok).



The chip order was nothing but trouble. The seller first shipped blue chips instead of the black I'd ordered and shorted the order by 25 red chips. The reshipped very quickly but...didn't seal the USPS envelope they used. I received it with a form from the Post Office inside saying that the envelope had been received unsealed and about half of the chips were missing. The vendor shipped again and I finally had a complete order.

The biggest disappointment was the chip body color. The vendor's web site showed a brilliant white body with colored insets. You can see in the pictures how off-white the chips are. Next issue was excessive material at the injection points on the chips. I had to go through 500 chips with an Xacto knife trimming off the excess material. Finally, a number of the chips had plastic so thin over the metal core that it was peeling off. I had to discard a bunch of them. I won't order new chips again without ordering a sample set.

I did something new with these. In prior chips I'd just used a Microsoft Word template to lay out the pages for printing. I used Adobe Illustrator this time and was able to create a layout layer that got each chip's position very nicely placed on the page. I then created a separate layer for the chip images. I was able to drop each chip image inside the centering circle on the layout layer and just turn off the layout layer for printing. Even better was that I was able to create a copy of each chip color's page and just change the chip image to the new color. Since the layout layer was already very nicely lined up it was a matter of just recentering the new chip images for the new color sheets.